Logic Question: Maintaining downloaded / updated Data after you make edits

[chloec]

Hi Folks - Looking for help with a logic question on data maintenance after you download fresh data.

1. My team downloads data from a system into excel (I think Power BI could be used)
2. The data is filtered into multiple tabs based on team name (each team gets their own tab of data)
3. Each team goes to the tab with their teams data and fills in some missing content - fills in 3 empty cells with data (on the spreadsheet, not in the source data)
4. When we "refresh" the downloaded data, all the edits made by the team get overwritten and note, new rows of data may be added, etc.

What is a logical way to update the data, and preserve the edits made and add date (if needed) to any new rows of data added?
I keep thinking that we could preserve a helper table but it feels unwieldly and didn't know if anyone has any better ideas.

 

[Peter Bartholomew]

Basically your data requires the definition of a primary key for each record. Then instead of filling in data and hoping the position is in some way
significant, the manually input tables are joined to the PQ tables by matching on foreign/primary keys. That can either be achieved by a formula or by returning to Power Query.

 

[chloec]

Peter, I am so sorry for missing this post. Thank you for the feedback, I'll try it out (I didn't think I got a response so I dropped thinking about the project). Went back to see if I got any responses and was surprised about your note. Picking it back up. Appreciate you @Peter Bartholomew

 

[Peter Bartholomew]

Good luck with it.

 

[pecoflyer]

You can easily adapt your preferences to receive a mail when you get a reaction, thus avoiding members wasting their time when you decide to "drop the matter"